COLIN FARRELL as Detective Sonny Crockett and JAMIE FOXX as Detective Ricardo Tubbs in ?Miami Vice?, the feature film crime drama that liberates what is adult, dangerous and alluring about working deeply undercover. ?Miami Vice? opens on July 28, 2006.

Michael Mann is a film director of significance ("Last of the Mohicans," "The Insider," "Heat"), but he first became known to the public as the executive producer of the "Miami Vice" TV series, which was a style-setting phenomenon in the mid-1980s. He returns to the scene of his first glory with "Miami Vice," the movie, investing in it much of what he's learned directing features over the past 15 years.

There are things not to like about "Miami Vice." That it's too long, that the story is confusing and not all that compelling, and Mann can take the blame for that -- he wrote the screenplay. But there's really no arguing with how he directed the picture. Mann finds unconventional ways to shoot conventional scenes. He has an instinct for when to linger and when to move on. His compositions are gorgeous, but not just gorgeous -- they create a feeling and invite reflection. And Mann gets strong performances from his actors.

The performances that jump out of "Miami Vice" are not those of principals Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, who play Sonny and Rico, Miami undercover cops doing high-stakes anti-drug work. They're both fine. Foxx fulfills his role's limited demands, while the earnest Farrell suffers from the lingering memory of Don Johnson's insouciance. Still, unless you've seen Johnson, you wouldn't know there are possibilities there that Farrell doesn't find.

It's the supporting players who stand out. Barry Shabaka Henley plays Sonny and Rico's boss, a big wall of a guy with an impassive face that could be made of stone, except for the sensitive, watchful eyes. His opposite is Luis Tosar as the drug kingpin Montoya, who appears to be a polite, casually dressed, balding fellow with a bushy beard -- hardly a monster, until you look into his eyes and see not merely a coldness but a hatred of human life. "I extend my best wishes to your families," he says, which from him is a bloodcurdling threat.

Mann creates something interesting in presenting the circle around Montoya, the kingpin our heroes want to bring down. In movies, evil usually is flamboyant. Here, it's casual and mundane. Montoya and his girlfriend-business partner, Isabella (Gong Li), sit in bed in their pajamas with a laptop, talking about whom to murder and when. A malaise infects the whole organization, with people occasionally springing to life, but only in perverse ways. Montoya's underling Yero (John Ortiz) is a study in perversity, disingenuous and murderous, joking and threatening, smiling and plotting, a real piece of work.

The casting of Gong is inspired. Her English is so shaky that easily 25 percent of the time her speech is impenetrable, but oh, how she says it. The idea of a beautiful Chinese woman running a South American drug cartel is in itself compelling, and when Isabella becomes attracted to Sonny, she becomes all the more sexy because she's scary. When will Mrs. Mantis bite off his head? The awakening of feeling in a woman who has previously been ice cold is nothing new in movies, but Gong doesn't play the cliche. She remains powerful, and her flashes of vulnerability -- only flashes -- are in their own way as alarming as her strength. This is not someone to toy with.

Mann begins the movie with a sting operation in a nightclub, but the story's not there -- it shifts gears into something about an undercover operation gone bad. An informant commits suicide by jumping in front of a truck, and how do you think Mann conveys that visually? Does he shake the camera for no reason? Does he go for the blood and gore? No. He just shows the vehicle moving forward and a single streak of blood running down the middle of the lane. Minutes earlier, Mann gives us the conventional scene of bad guys shooting up a car with people inside it. We've seen that in scores of movies, but Mann films the action from inside the car, where it all feels more personal.

The shots of the open ocean, as seen from a motorboat heading to Havana on a summer night -- that's not just beautiful, that's romance. Then again, it's 10 seconds of romance, and that's the thing about "Miami Vice": Everything good or great about it is a disparate entity, a shot, a look, a moment, a feeling, a suggestion. Even the intriguing element of Isabella and Sonny's involvement is just a subplot. The main action involves the crime-drama story, and that doesn't have much interest. Worse, it degenerates into virtual incoherence in the last third of the movie.

Film critics are fed a steady diet of junk, so to see a movie like this, made by someone who actually knows what he's doing, is to be tempted to overpraise it. But the truest thing to say about "Miami Vice" is that it's an OK picture with some superb things in it.